The world's largest chipmaker faces a delicate balance of continuing to push out chips for personal computers while attempting to increase its mobile presence, and analysts doubting Intel helped push the company's stock to the worst performance in the Standard & Poor's 500 and Dow Jones indexes Monday.

Santa Clara-based Intel's shares dropped 3.6 percent to $23.19 Monday, as two analysts joined in a chorus of doubters that see demand for PC chips dropping and a mobile environment that offers very small profit margins. Intel is stuck in the middle, making a big push into mobile despite the smaller profits such a move will generate.

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"It's something they have to navigate carefully," Bernstein Research analyst Stacy Rasgon told The Mercury News. "It's a touchy time."

Intel has been trailing ARM Holdings in the mobile market, which the company ignored for years. Last month, however, Intel's new mobile chips tested at far lower energy usage in an independent competition conducted by ABI Research, surprising outsiders and heralding greater mobile-chip sales.

More sales does not mean greater profits, though: JP Morgan estimates that a tablet chip typically costs about $25 to $30, while Intel receives about $110 for notebook chips, leading the investment bank's analysts to conclude "expected unit shipments are too small to offset declining demand in notebooks."

Citi's Glen Yeung maintained his "Hold" rating and $24 price target for the stock, but brought down profit projections and said that the squeeze will likely show up in Intel's second-quarter earnings report, expected to be released next week.

"While dividend yield and optimism around Intel's opportunities in tablets and handsets limit downside, we find it difficult to believe Intel shares will break out to the upside in light of the poor PC environment," Yeung wrote.

Evercore Partners analyst Patrick Wang was harsher, downgrading the stock to "Underweight," equivalent to "Sell," and dropping his price target from $22 to $20 while reporting that Intel's mobile push will not make a great deal of difference in the company's finances even next year.

"We don't expect share gains in tablets and smartphones to be material to 2014 (earnings per share)," Wang wrote.

And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 8.57, or 0.53 percent, to 1,640.46

Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Jeremy C. Owens at 408-920-5876; follow him at Twitter.com/mercbizbreak.